Transparency, Facebook privacy options, 2020, epoxy resin, print, 45 x 31 x 12cm
Post lucem tenebrae (2018-2021)
In Post lucem tenebrae, I work with layered resin blocks to reflect on the overwhelming, opaque power structures embedded in what appear to be simple digital agreements. These works are cast in translucent epoxy, each one built up layer by layer with the printed terms and conditions of platforms and services that quietly govern our lives – Facebook, Apple, Amazon, iCloud.
I began this series by printing out dozens of pages of privacy policies and user agreements – texts I, like most people, have accepted without reading. Each page was embedded layer by layer into translucent resin blocks. You can see the text, even focus on isolated words, but the density of information renders the whole nearly unreadable. This unreadability is the point: these so-called contracts flood us with transparency until the effect is no longer enlightening but blinding.
The format echoes the acrylic "tombstones" traditionally given to commemorate major financial transactions – a physical token of invisible power. Here, there is no significant transaction when you click "I agree." And yet, millions of such distracted acquiescences generate empires of influence, concentrating extraordinary control in the hands of a few – Zuckerbergs, Bezoses – who shape the very frameworks of our digital lives.
The title reverses the Protestant motto Post tenebras lux ("After darkness, light"), which once celebrated the Enlightenment brought forth by print and the Reformation. Five centuries later, the promise of information as liberation has collapsed into something far more ambivalent. We are saturated with access, flooded by disclosures, surveilled in the name of openness. The result is a world where transparency is no longer a means to freedom, but a tool of obfuscation and power.
I see these sculptures not only as material meditations on information and consent, but also as monuments to the silent, cumulative force of the digital contracts we barely notice – yet live within every day.
Transparency, iCloud Terms and Conditions, 2020, epoxy resin, print, 40 x 30 x 12cm
Transparency, Apple iOSTerms and Conditions, 2020, epoxy resin, print, 60 x 15 x 12cm
